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[Product Reviews] Good or Bad

Lately I have been getting a few mails asking me to review this and that. I have to admit I have mixed feelings about this and am not sure how to go about it.

Do any of you do reviews for products and items and mention them on your blogs?
Or do you have a strict rule against such reviews?

I'd love to hear more about the reasons behind your choices and the pro and cons of such things.

Thanks!


This Post was written by Meeta from What's For Lunch, Honey?

[Reader/Commenter Behaviour] ISP Tracking and Blogger

Does anyone know if Blogger has a way to track ISPs and comments?

This Post was written by Jasmine from Cardamom Addict

[Promoting your blog] Blogger's Choice Awards

Have you been nominated? Probably. Just about everyone has. It's understandable to be flattered but before you promote their activities, use their bug and ask for "votes", please be aware they are a part of PayPerPost an organization that you might not want to be affiliated with in any way shape or form.

PayPerPost were the ones who pioneered paying bloggers to shill for various clients. Call it advertorial, or advertising, it was very unethical the way they went about it. Now they require that posters reveal that they are being paid to say something nice about a product or service but frankly it still makes my skin crawl! This kind of activity damages the credibility of all bloggers.

This Post was written by Amy from Cooking with Amy.

Responding to commentor's emails..?

In nice ole Blogger you could respond to comments to your posts that arrived instantly in your email.
This is no longer the case in "new" Blogger.
Your response will be returned to you :(
Is there a work-arround for this frustrating glitch?
It seems the old way was more friendly...
Thanks

Carolg from www.parisbreakfasts.com

Help with Blogger Template Display in Firefox?

I just re-did my template in Blogger, and I have some stuff in my header and the titles of my blog posts that won't show up correctly on Firefox - it's fine in IE 6. I had always thought Firefox didn't recognize my font (Rockwell) but it does recognize it on the sidebar - can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong? Thanks so much in advance!!

Ok - update - I now have the picture issue fixed thanks to a fellow local blogger, but I cannot figure out why Firefox won't recognize my font in the blog title or post titles, though it recognizes it in my links? Also, a couple of links on the righthand side, to NPR Food and Bay Area Bites aren't showing up, though the code is identical to the rest. Any ideas? I would love to use Firefox if I could make it work for me, but these problems are really annoying!

This Post was written by Alice from Alice Q. Foodie

Blogger pictures, comments

Hi, is anyone having trouble publishing pictures and enabling comments on Blogger since May 18? Or is there something that I'm doing wrong?
I managed to bring the comments tab back after saving repeatedly manually (despite the new AutoSave feature) but am still unable to publish pictures directly.
I've just posted one through Flickr, more as a test post than anything else. Posting through Picasa didn't work as the picture later became invisible.

This Post was written by Sra from When My Soup Came Alive

The Edit Pencil Returns

A while back I wrote this post complaining that when I switched to new Blogger, the "instant edit" pencil at the bottom of the posts disappeared. I used this a lot, so I was sad to see it missing. In the comments some people surmised that it might have been because I removed the Blogger nav bar at the top.

Now I'm happy to report that this must have been a new Blogger bug that was fixed, because the pencil is back on all my blogs! It's a really useful tool for blogger users, if you haven't tried it. As long as you're logged in, it's easy to click the pencil and edit if you ever spot an error in a post, no matter how long ago it was.


This Post was written by Kalyn from Kalyn's Kitchen

Weird php code problem

A reader brought this problem to my attention today and I can only assume its been going on since I gave my blog a makeover a couple of weeks ago. This problem only happens in IE. In my sidebar, after a link is clicked it disappears until it is hovered over and then it momentarily reappears. I checked out the style.php code and found this code that controls that portion of the sidebar action:

.side ul a:hover {
color: ;
background-color: ;
}

I was able to fix it by a total fluke of accidently leaving off the } at the end of that statement. So now it works in FF and IE but this doesn't make any sense to me. Does anyone know php well enough to explain this to me ? Thanks.


This Post was written by Vanessa from What geeks eat...

Gourmet Institute Anyone?

I'm wondering if anyone else is planning to go to the Gourmet Institute weekend in October? I have signed up, and I am hoping to meet up with some other food bloggers there. I am a little bit ashamed to admit that I'm not actually taking the seminar about food blogging - but it conflicted with Masaharu Morimoto's cooking demonstration! I also signed up for a seminar on aroma with Grant Achatz, a photography clinic with Romulo Yanes, and a discussion with Ruth Reichl and Drew Nieporent on reviewing restaurants.

The weekend includes a fancy cocktail reception on Friday night (Oct. 19) 8 classes/seminars on Saturday and Sunday, and a four course dinner Saturday night with a choice of Aureole, the Grill Room at the Four Seasons or Le Bernardin. (I chose Le Bernardin.) Lunch and breakfast are also provided at a nearby hotel. The total coast is $1395. which is a lot, but I figure my husband goes on his ski trips and Vegas weekends, so I can swing this - especially if I go by myself. I'm looking into a nearby studio apt rental to cut the lodging costs a bit.

If your interest is piqued you can learn more and review the class schedule here. Hope to see you there!

This Post was written by Alice from Alice Q. Foodie

Wijit

I was wondering if anyone had also recieved this and or tried this.
this is lifted from an email I got today. Just checking with those in the know!!

We here at Lijit Networks have developed what we like to call a Lijit Search Wijit which is basically a kind of vertical search that revolves around a person, their online content and their network.

Our wijit (a creative reworking of the widget) will allow your readers to not only search your blog but also your del.icio.us or magnolia bookmarks, anything that presents itself as an RSS feed (flickr, youtube, etc.) or other sources that you have marked as trusted, like your blogroll.

This Post was written by Heather from Eating For One.

Dropped from Google and blocked for content

Many thanks to everyone who helped me get predatory pop-ups off my site.

I am afraid I need to trouble you again. My site is still blocked for some users "due to content." What might cause this? It seems to be a fairly recent development, or at least I only heard of it recently.

Equally troubling, My site is not turning up on Google or technorati searches, or "wikio" or "sphere" and possibly others. I am really hurting. I know Google used to send about 30/day, and then all of a sudden--nothing!


This Post was written by THE CHOCOLATE LADY from In Mol Araan

Plagued by Pop-Ups

I have two possibly related problems:

For several months now, everyone who visits my blog is plagued by predatory pop-up ads from ilead.itrack.it. These are horribly annoying, and some of them have contained graphic pornography, but in any case I don't want any ads on my site! Even Firefox cannot prevent them from opening. Can I get rid of them?

I have also learned that my site is blocked "because of content" on certain servers. Could this be because of the pornographic ads? I cannot imagine that anything I have written is the least bit controversial, not even a negative book-review. Most of the ads are not pornographic.

I am sure this must have been discussed before, but I could not find anything in the Blog S'cool archives


This Post was written by the chocolate lady from In Mol Araan

Linking to a section of a post

I hope I can do a good job of explaining this. I am looking for a way to link to a certain section of a post. It is probably best explained with an example.

A little while ago I wrote a post describing and explaining Indian Spices. It is a long post and I would now like to use this as a reference for my future posts. So, say I am writing about a recipe which contains turmeric powder, I would link to be able to link to my Indian Spice post and have the particular section where I described Turmeric Powder come up. Currently when I link to the post it simply does the usual and brings the reader to the beginning of the post leaving them to scroll down to find the entry about the particular spice. Not comfortable.
(did that make sense?)

I often see this on pages like FAQs etc.

So I was wondering if there is a special code or a way to do this and if anyone can talk me through it.


This Post was written by Meeta from What's For Lunch, Honey?

[WordPress] Upgrading from 2.0x to 2.1/2.2

I've been putting this off for several months since hearing about some of the calamities bloggers experienced when upgrading to 2.1, but now that 2.2 is coming I think it's probably time to upgrade. I've upgraded the rest of our blogs, but I'm dreading doing the food blog since it's the largest and has the most categories.

I remember a post back in January in which some of us discussed the messes that occurred during upgrades, and I was wondering if anyone else had recently attempted or reattempted and how it went.

This Post was written by ANDREA from ANDREA'S RECIPES.

I am not as lame as I sometimes seem

(or death to word verification)

My dear blogger friends,

I know that I am bad about commenting on your blogs, but just a note to say that I write probably double the number of comments that go up. The problem is that I am super, super ADD (not really but I often feel like it). And half of the time I write comments on your blog, do the word verification, don't realize that I FAILED the word verification test, and then eventually close my browser.

This week alone, I tried to write Mary a comment about a good restaurant in Ukiah (and to ask her to bring me back some Navarro wine), and then I tried to write a comment to Jennifer about this lovely post, and those are just the ones I can remember.

I swear, I know it's a necessary evil in the days of spam and robot comments. But sheesh, it's killing this thirty-something San Franciscan. And really, if I can't figure it out I wonder how many other people it is driving crazy as well.

Please tell me that I am not alone in this absolute hatred of word verification!

(This all brings to mind this comment thread from Cookiecrumb's blog a while back.)


This Post was written by Jen Maiser from Life Begins at 30.

Word Press

I participate in a blog that uses Word Press and I'm appalled at how slowly it performs when creating and editing entries. Is this typical of Word Press?

This Post was written by Kevin from Seriously Good

How can I get readers to leave comments on my blog?

I have a restaurant review blog at http://restaurantmom.blogspot.com. I probably get about 20-30 hits on my blog each week (so I know people are reading the posts) but I rarely, if ever, get comments on each review. I've even asked for comments and still nothing. Has anyone else with a restaurant review blog had success with garnering comments from readers? Any tips? Thanks.

This Post was written by Restaurant Mom from CENTRAL FLORIDA RESTAURANT MOM

Image Source Links Won't Work

Does anybody have photo links in their blogger sidebar using photos you've uploaded through blogger?

This is my problem:

I have several photos/images in the sidebar on my blog, Farmgirl Fare, that link to various other sites. The top three jpeg images in the current sidebar were all uploaded last year by me through Picasa's Hello (which no longer works).

I would upload the image, save it as a blog post on a separate non-public blogger blog that I have, open the post, click on the image to enlarge it, and use that url in the "img src" part of the link.

I now upload my photos directly through blogger. I want to use fresh images for some of my sidebar links, but the img src links won't work. The image urls themselves do work, however.

I have no idea why this would be.

I don't know if this will help, but here is an example of an image link (taken from my Farmgirl Fare template) currently in my sidebar that does work: (I had to remove some of the <>, plus the end part with /a> because otherwise it put the actual image link in this post; I also split up the code here)

a href="http://inmykitchengarden.com" target="_blank">

img src="http://photos1.blogger.com/hello/275/6184/
1024/thumbnail%20chard%20sprouts%20cropped.jpg"/>

Today I replaced this part of the code:
http://photos1.blogger.com/hello/275/
6184/1024/thumbnail%20chard%20sprouts%20cropped.jpg

with this:
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_h2EzbV4lTjA/
RjopKPxmZ_I/AAAAAAAAALk/
XFaTELh6v80/s1600-h/lettuce+imkg+with+border.JPG

All I got in the template preview and on the actual blog was a red x-ed out square where the image should be.

Okay, duh. I forgot about View Source. If you open it up on my Farmgirl Fare and go about 3/4 of the way down, you can see two other attempts I made a few months ago to add new photo links at the top of the sidebar. The same thing happened as today, but I just left them there with that ! code thing so they wouldn't show up.

Any idea what is going on? If you have image links in your blogger sidebar but didn't upload/save the images on blogger, where did you put them?

I use Windows XP, IE 6, and the new blogger. I'm also an html beginner and get confused by technical talk pretty easily. Any help greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Posted by farmgirl from Farmgirl Fare